One
of the first big television miniseries, The Thorn Birds was an
immediate success when it aired in 1983. The tragic romance between
Meggie Cleary (Rachel Ward), the woman who wants only to love and be
loved, and Ralph de Briccasart (Richard Chamberlain), the priest who
is torn between his holy vows and his human passions, is the seed for
a highly entertaining story that spans fifty years and touches on
love, hatred, revenge, forgiveness, marriage, birth, and death. The
Thorn Birds received acclaim as well as popularity, winning six
Emmy Awards: Best Actress (Barbara Stanwyck, as Mary Carson, the head
of Drogheda), Best Supporting Actor (Richard Kiley, as Meggie's
father), Best Supporting Actress (Jean Simmons, as Meggie's mother),
Best Art Direction, Best Film Editing, and Best Makeup. Now that it's
come to DVD, The Thorn Birds proves to hold up quite well even
twenty years later.

The
Thorn Birds offers a broad stage for its romantic drama to play
out, from the Australian Outback to the Vatican in terms of location,
and from the 1920s to almost the present day. It's an unabashedly
melodramatic story, and therein lies the fun: if we're going to
follow the lives of a group of characters over fifty years, why, we
want interesting things to happen to them, and The Thorn Birds
obliges. That's not to say that the story overdoes it: the twists in
the story are entirely plausible and the characters' reactions to
these events are reasonable. And while the characters may sometimes
have dialogue or speeches that are a bit over-dramatic, they always
remain in the realm of the believable. Is it because Meggie, Ralph,
and the others really are realistic characters, or is it that we want
to believe in them because they're interesting?
Who knows – in any case, the story gets us hooked into their
lives and keeps us interested in how things turn out.

The
first episode does get off to a slow start; we are introduced to the
characters who will be important players in the story, but it's not
immediately clear where the story is headed or who we should be most
interested in. About halfway through the first part, though, the
story tightens up a bit and becomes more engaging, and from there it
remains consistently entertaining up to the end.

After
it gets going, the story is well paced, and as we move into the
second, third, and final episodes, there's always something new going
on: new people for the main characters to interact with, new places
as the characters move on with their lives, new events for them to
deal with. Whether it's Meggie's life in Queensland or Frank's career
in Rome, the varied settings and events make the story more memorable
than if it had remained entirely focused on Drogheda, even though
that ranch remains the center point of the characters' lives. One of
the aspects of The Thorn Birds that I enjoyed is that the
story doesn't fixate on just one period in the characters' lives: the
story moves on at a relatively fast pace, sometimes jumping ahead
only one or two years, sometimes much longer (fortunately, always
with a clear indication of how much time has passed). I've always
enjoyed "generational sagas" and The Thorn Birds
fits the bill admirably, making good use of its full fifty years of
story time.

The
Thorn Birds shows a few weak spots, one of which is the total
inconsistency of the characters' accents. We get a wild mix of U.S.,
British, Irish, and Australian accents that have no apparent relation
to whether the character is supposed to be, as most of them are,
either Irish or Australian. The transition from
Meggie-as-a-little-girl (played by Sydney Penney) to
Meggie-as-young-woman (played by Rachel Ward) is also a bit awkward;
there are some scenes in the middle that really cry out for a third,
intermediate-age actress in the part instead of the too-young Penney
being used to play Meggie as an adolescent. But these are just small
bumps in an otherwise very entertaining story; it's not perfect, but
in the end, it's lots of fun.

The
DVD

The Thorn Birds is a two-DVD set, packaged in a cardboard
fold-out holder inside a cardboard slipcase. Each disc is a
"flipper," with one episode on Side A and the other on Side
B.

Video

The Thorn Birds appears in its original television aspect
ratio of 1.33:1. Rather oddly, the transfer varies a great deal in
quality from beginning to end of the miniseries. The first episode
looks terrible: it's extremely blurry and the contrast is lousy, with
detail completely lost in any dark areas. At this point, I would have
given the image quality about one and a half stars as a rating. As
the series progresses, the image quality gradually improves, becoming
sharper and cleaner-looking, so that by the time we get to the fourth
episode, close-up shots look very crisp and clear, and even the
longer-distance shots have a reasonable level of clarity and detail;
contrast has also improved. I'd probably have given the image three
and a half stars if it had all been like this. The one slight flaw
that's consistent across the series is the colors are very slightly
muted, with a faint brownish tint. Overall, I've ended up giving an
average mark, two and a half stars, to the image quality.

Audio

The Dolby mono soundtrack provided for The Thorn Birds is
reasonable for this dialogue-driven show. It's obviously lacking in
depth, but the sound is clear and natural. The musical soundtrack is
annoyingly sappy at first, but either it improves as the series
progresses, or I got used to it, because it seemed perfectly fine by
the end.

Extras

On Side B of the second disc, we have a 25-minute featurette called
"The Thorn Birds: Old Friends, New Stories." It's a
nicely done retrospective on the making of the series, with both the
filmmakers and the principal actors (Chamberlain and Ward) offering
their thoughts on what it was like to make the series. The featurette
is refreshingly non-promotional, and jumps right into interesting
information about the series, such as the casting process for the
role of Meggie.

Final
thoughts

The Thorn Birds has a place in television history as the
second-most-watched miniseries of all time (conceding the number one
slot to Roots), and its appeal turns out to be a lasting one:
this saga of forbidden love and the conflict between the spirit and
the flesh, dramatized by Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward, is a
very entertaining one. Fans of the series will be disappointed that
the image quality is not better, but at any rate it's watchable.
Overall, The Thorn Birds gets a solid "recommended."